It was a good day when Arkansas beat Texas in Austin. This Sunday Sports page from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette pretty much captured the feeling. It was a great weekend for Razorback football.

Not so many great sports pages lately. Not alot to cheer about.

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I have little knowledge of the Iron Mountain Railroad, other than what I can find here. The date of the print is 1886. Also this page of the Missouri Pacific Historical Society, gives a timeline of the Iron Mountain Railroad. It also went by other names at times, like the St. Louis Railway, and the Southern Railway.

It’s interesting to me because it had scheduled stops in Malvern, near Hot Springs.

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Old maps provide interesting viewpoints not just on geography but on our state’s rich historical socio-politial heritage. .. Pause. Try not to laugh out loud. Didn’t that sound intelligent?

I like looking at older Arkansas maps and watching how the state and county borders developed over time. And you also get clues about places that used to be points of interest, but are no longer. The old, old maps always point out the Salt Works near Arkadelphia, evidently a place where the Indians, particularly the Caddo Indians, well, made salt.

..the prehistoric Caddo made salt. Salt making began about 1200, coinciding with the dominance of corn in the diet. Many brine seeps in southwest Arkansas were strong enough to provide salt from boiling by using simple technology. Brine was boiled over open fireplaces in large, thick pottery pans and platters. Large utilitarian jars evidently were used to dry and store the salt at the manufacturing site and later were broken and left scattered around the salt works. The prehistoric Caddo were part-time salt makers; people who lived near the brine locations made salt at family compounds when they were not farming, hunting, and performing household duties. The best-known salt works are in the Ouachita River valley near Arkadelphia (Clark County) and in the Little River and Rolling Fork River valleys in southwest Arkansas.

..Around 1700, French explorers encountered Native American traders similarly moving boatloads of salt to villages in central Louisiana.

This map from 1866 is focused on major rail lines.

Below is a territorial map, created in 1823, obviously before statehood. More on territorial and state borders history here

I imagine an old man sitting at a drafting table, just himself and the pen, spending an entire day on this lettering, below.

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Remember back in the day, when it required a mixture of encyclopedia skills and an overactive imagination to get a mind’s picture of faraway places? I do.

Well, things change.

And in this case almost overnight.
Football is to Saturdays as Geography is to Flickr.

Explore photos by place, by scrolling around on a map. After Flickr rolled out this new feature, over 1 million photos were assigned a map location by individual users in a single day. Amazing.

Don’t give up on browsing the map too quickly. It takes a few minutes to get used to how it works.

You can even browse the world map for photos from specific users. I’ve “geotagged” a few, and plan on more. Some people, like themexican evidently have access to multiple credit cards, and have traveled many a place.